Hagel: “Let the Jews pay for it!”

Jim Backlin

Barack Obama has put up the scariest group of 2nd term nominees for his major cabinet posts since Franklin Roosevelt. One of Obama’s extreme left-wing nominations includes his Secretary of State nominee, John Kerry, who many of us Vietnam War veterans believe is a traitor to those of us who served; most especially after his treasonous remarks disparaging war veterans during a wartime congressional hearing.

John Kerry said this during an anti-war congressional hearing on April 22, 1971 after he came back from Vietnam: "They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Another Vietnam veteran, who did serve honorably during the Vietnam War, has been nominated by Obama to be his new Secretary of Defense: the former undistinguished Senator, Chuck Hagel, who is also a small, petty and divisive man. Incidentally, as a United States senator, Hagel -- whose Senate confirmation hearing is on Thursday -- was among the worst bosses to work for according to a new survey using staff turn-over statistics.

Hagel, in his later years as a senator, was one of the left-wing media’s favorite Republicans because of his attacks against the Bush administration and indeed, still is a media favorite, because of his membership in organizations such as the George Soros-funded anti-war Ploughshares Fund which advocates a nuclear-free world. Hagel’s group partners with such radical organizations as the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, also not a friend of Israel.

Hagel used to be president and CEO of the World USO (United Services Organizations) in the late 1980’s. He was adamantly against maintaining the USO center in Haifa, Israel. Marshal Halteman, director for military and law enforcement programs at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), said that Chuck Hagel told her during a meeting in 1989 with Jewish leaders who wanted to keep the USO Haifa Center open: “Let the Jews pay for it!”

Senator John Barrasso, R-WY, said he found Chuck Hagel’s reference to backers of Israel as the “Jewish lobby” that intimidates Congress as “troubling and insulting.” Chuck Hagel is also insulting -- with such nearly anti-Semitic comments -- pro-Israel groups such as Christian Coalition of America which held a massive “Support Israel Rally” in Washington D.C.

You would think that Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense could distinguish himself more from certain viewpoints of the tyrant president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi who said: "These futile (Israeli-Palestinian) negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities as the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims lose time and opportunities and get nothing out of it.”

The executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), David Harris, said his group asked all 100 United States senators in 1999 to sign a statement -- published as a full-page advertisement in “The New York Times” -- against anti-Semitism in Russia and said that the only senator who refused to sign it was Chuck Hagel. Another group, of which Hagel is a member, the Atlantic Council, published a front-page article entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Policy,” actually trying to associate Israel with the old South Africa with its racist apartheid policies.

United States senators who support Israel should emphatically oppose the nomination of Chuck Hagel; one of the most anti-Israel nominees for Secretary of Defense ever nominated by any American president.